It's a magazine that runs 10,000-word articles on African states and the pension system, has almost no pictures and is published in black and white. So how does the New Yorker sell more than a million copies a week?
Says Malcom Gladwell: "we live in a suddenly serious time, where people have an appetite for intelligent, thoughtful explanations of consequential topics."
It doesn't take a genius to work out that one hundred per cent of his readers are not going to get home from work, put their keys down and say: "You know, honey, what I need to do now is read 10,000 words on Congo."
You might say that what looks at first like common sense is David Remnick's most winning eccentricity.
